I wanted to share with you a little game I call “Origin of My Name”. It’s for teams that are trying to get to know each other and get to know each other really quickly. So it goes like this. You want to go around, in a circle with everyone facing each other. Whether you want to stand or sit up is fine with me. You’ll want to give each person about 60 seconds to tell everybody the origin of their first, middle and last name. After each person is done, you’ll move on to the next person. I would start with… My name is Melissa Jane Love. Melissa comes from a great grandmother of mine that I was named after. I never had the pleasure of meeting her but my mother had a wonderful relationship with her. Jane is after my aunt Janie who lives in Illinois. She served in the Navy and I’m very proud of her and I really respect what she did for our country. My last name is Love, just like “I love you”– L.O.V.E I used to be one of those women that thought before I got married, before I fell in love with Mr. Chris Love, the man of my dreams, “I don’t need anyone to tell me what my last name is.
But I fell in love with Chris Love and 21 years later I am a “LOVE” and am still in love. I’m happy to be part of the Love family. So that’s the origin of my name. So you would have everybody in your team go around and share those things about one another. Oftentimes, we know what a person’s names is, but we have no idea where it came from. It’s a way to help people practice telling a story because they know what their story is. It’s their personal story. Sometimes maybe they have an inkling of where their name came from. Maybe not. But it’s just a way to get people talking. I have learned some amazing things about people by doing this. Things like they’re connected to royalty and their relation to Matthew McConaughey, or, just really crazy things that their parents fought over their first name. It helps you get a little inkling of the kind of person they are and where they come from, and a little bit about their history… things that you don’t necessarily share at the water cooler or the beginning of a meeting. I encourage you to try that little game. Try that little exercise, especially if you have a brand new team and everybody’s trying to get to know each other. Let me know how it goes.